God Gives Nuts to People Without Teeth

More time on a plane, to give my inbox a colonic irrigation, but also jot down some cool links. Whose stuff am I enjoying, and what’s making me chuckle?

More declarative living. Here is Softpedia on Google Sitemaps, an XML-based approach to help Google crawlers navigate through a site. Via CoverPages

From the review

“The purpose of the Google Sitemaps project is enabling webmasters to inform and direct the Google spiders through their website. Sitemaps provide crawlers with information about the website’s structure as well as data about its pages.Sitemaps are text files in the XML format that contain information about the website, a list of webpages and some corresponding parameters.

Sitemaps can also be based on the ‘Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting’, a popular and standard protocol, so anyone that already has OAI-PMH 2.0 sitemaps can submit them unaltered to Google.”

This is a potentially interesting declarative metadata approach, a structural attestation. Its a kind of web 2.0 instrumentation, with Google as the uber measurement company.

What else is on my mind? What do I like about Dennis Howlett? His foul mouth (seriously, he swears more than me… those who know me know just what a claim that is (not on his blog though). His technical druthers. His knowledge of accounting, and the history and contexts of its automation. His knowledge of the underlying role of the gold standard in the economy, his short links, the European focus (he left the food/lifestyle/culture wasteland of England for France and now Spain), his ludicrous tan, his cynicism, and did i remember to mention his cynicism? Of course, like many cynics, within Dennis also lies an uncurable romantic – see his posts on European integration…

From Bazaarz
Microsoft (Harvard) v OSS (Forrester)
A Harvard Business School analysis says the neither Microsoft nor OSS get killed in a heads up fight for market share. Forrester says innovation networks are the next major stage of development but says Microsoft is perplexed. What can we make of these seemingly opposite views?

Cool map of Firefox adoption in Europe

Dennis is also essential reading for European spin bunny and or analyst relations types. Interesting he hasn’t posted on Edelman’s Polish adverntures yet. He recently went under the covers of some financials at big PR firms like Lewis. How often do we see these organizations in the news? Who is watching PR companies? Dennis, for one.

Oh yeah – think Spain might get big into blogging? See here.

He will not appreciate me putting him next to Spain (and underneath it) but i have to also tell you all to check out Jaime Cardoso. He is always funny (even when he misses Register irony), is a Sun evangelist of stature, and works at a Portuguese reseller building data center configurations.

Jaime has a way with a saying.

I found out that Jonathan Schwartz never took the console of an E25K, … God gives nuts to people who have no teeth. I thought the main advantage of being a Sun High exec was I could have assigned to my personal use one of these babies.

Couldn’t we just shut down ChoicePoint and Axciom? (via Bruce Schneier)
until they improve the quality of their data? If not, why don’t customers threaten to pull business from these companies. If the data quality is so poor then shouldn’t customers pay dramatically less for it? That might get shareholders’ attention…

One Schneier commenter (AC) asked – why not sue for libel?

I believe in being more competitive by being less competitive. Here is a great example from Feedburner, via Moonwatcher. Like Charlie says: “Kudos to the FeedBurner team for making things better for their customers, even at the expense of “lock-in” value.”

How to shop at Nordstrom’s. Rob Curran will like this one. I can now see why someone (Tim Bray?) linked to this guy…He’s funny as hell. Oh no – another one for the aggregator…

Nordstrom, Foleys, Nordstom, Foleys, erm, left. No, straight on. will they have socks? of course they will. they’ll have those thin old man socks that cost $15 dollars and have diamonds up the side. right then, Foleys. Left. No, hang on, I can get presents in Nordstrum too. right, Nordstrum it is. ok, left. I think, hang on, ALRIGHT MATE! I’M THINKING!